Poverty in the World Today

What’s
it like to be really poor?

What’s
it like to be really poor?

More than 3 billion people live on less
than $2.50 a day and an estimated 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty, making
do with $1.25 or less daily.

Can you imagine what it’s like to not have enough
food to eat and go to bed hungry at night?

Poverty is still a big problem in the world
today, as you can see from the numbers. This is in spite of the progress that
you see around you. The good news is that in 2010, only 18% of the world’s
population was living way below the poverty line as compared to 36% in 1990.
It’s a small victory, but the progress is slow.

The World Bank aims to reduce global
poverty to 9% by 2020 and to 3% by 2030. They plan to do this by focusing more
on promoting income growth for the bottom 40% of the population and boosting
shared prosperity. It’s a herculean
task.

How
is poverty measured?

The problem with poverty is that the causes
are extremely complicated with different factors contributing to the problem.
Ending it requires more than just economic growth. “Developed” countries with
strong economies still have a significant number of people who are struggling
to survive.

How do we even measure poverty? The state
of poverty is not the same for everybody. A person may be earning $3 a day but
their financial capability still needs to be compared to the rest of the
population. So, a poor person in the US
has a different poverty level than a poor person in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Although poverty has been
declining for the last 3 decades, the poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa
continued to increase between 1981 and 2010. It went up from 205 million to 414
million.

Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for
1/3 of the world’s poorest people, another 1/3 comes from India and then China,
contributing 13% to the global poverty statistics.

In 2010, the average income of
the poor people in developing countries increased from 74 cents to 87 cents per
day. But the income of the extreme poor
in Sub-Saharan Africa remained flat at less than half of $1.25 per day.

Around 1.1 billion people in
developing countries don’t have access to water and 2.6 billion live in poor
conditions lacking basic sanitation.

1.6 billion people live without
electricity.

Ending
Poverty

Studies show that the more developed a
country becomes, the larger the income gap grows. We can see from these numbers
that a country’s economic growth does not guarantee that its citizens will be
lifted out of poverty. What needs to be solved is the inequality that develops.

If you can imagine, a poor person in an
industrialized country will find it harder to interact within their society,
than a poor person in a poor country. The disparity will be more obvious when
there is a wider income gap between the rich and the poor. Due to this
inequality, the instances of crime can increase when people find themselves
looked down upon and disrespected. They feel the injustice of their situation
even more.

No one wants to be poor. Sometimes you are
born to it and your circumstances give you fewer options. You spend your days
trying your best to survive, with no energy left to think about being creative
and being concerned about the things that you and I think about daily.

What are the solutions being proposed to
solve the problem of poverty around the world?

Bring education to the
extremely poor to enable them to have better jobs.

Give them Health Care to
improve their physical conditions and make them more competitive.

Use the budget allocated for
War and Weapons to stop Global Hunger.

Governments should invest in
programs and projects that will be beneficial to improving the lives of the
poor – to open opportunities for them to lift themselves out of poverty. More
schools, better sanitation, a cleaner environment and more income
opportunities.

Give people living without
electricity access to renewable energy.

Reducing poverty is doable. Now more than
ever, we have the technology and the tools we need to end it. What we need is
to increase our efforts and support current initiatives. With everyone’s help
and the willingness of our poor population, we might just succeed.

Learn more about the social and
environmental issues we are facing today. Find out how you can contribute to
the efforts to make our world a better place. Read The World Counts: Stories